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Today's episode deals with a crime committed against a child that won't be suitable for all listeners.

As the midweek workday was wrapping up on Wednesday November 11, 1987, staff were closing stores and filtering out of offices throughout YbSwitch,

and inland urban region on the western edge of Brisbane in Queensland, Australia. At 5.30pm, 24-year-old retail assistant Cheryl Mortimer finished her shift at the Target Department Store, located in the Buvail Fair Shopping Centre.

After business hours, activity around the centre had died down significantly and very few people were still around.

The adjacent car park, which was usually packed with cars, was now quiet and near deserted.

Cheryl collected her vehicle and drove towards the parking lot exit, where her attention was drawn to an unassuming middle aged woman with short hair and a frumpy physique.

The woman was flagging Cheryl down, indicating she needed directions. Cheryl pulled over to assist.

As the two women interacted, a younger-looking slim man seemingly sprang out of nowhere and rushed at Cheryl, placing a knife to her throat.

The man cut his own hand with the knife accidentally, leaving his bloody fingerprint smeared on the window of Cheryl's car.

The attack came to an abrupt halt when one of Cheryl's colleagues appeared and approached the scene, causing the man and woman to flee in a white-holed and King's Wood station wagon.

Shaken, but otherwise unheard, Cheryl went straight to the police station to report the incident, providing a detailed statement of her ordeal, including a description of the perpetrator's vehicle and her best recollection of its licence play.

She believed it to have been an interstate licence play, perhaps from New South Wales, with the registration number LLE-439.

By seven o'clock that evening, Ipswich Police tracked down the person linked to the registration number given by Cheryl Mortimer.

They discovered the licence plates were attached to a Toyota Corolla sedan, not a hold in station wagon.

At Zona resided in a country town in the neighbouring state of New South Wales, and had been nowhere near Queensland at that night.

Indicating Cheryl had misread her perpetrator's licence plate.

The bloody fingerprint was taken from the window of Cheryl's car, but with no suspects to compare it to, all officers could do with store it on file, in hopes it might lead them to identifying the perpetrator in the future.

Despite having little to go on, Detective Constable Graham Hall of the Ipswich Criminal Investigation Branch was determined to find Cheryl Mortimer's attackers.

He ran a small notice about the assault in the local Ipswich newspaper.

This publicity led to two nurses from Ipswich General Hospital coming forward, both revealing they too had frightening encounters with a man in a white Kingswood Holden station wagon.

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